Sensations
by Assimbya
Summary: Mina muses on the blood exchange of October Second during the long month when, still in the Count's thrall, she prepares to kill him.


In the long month that she spends between life and death, it seems as though she can think of nothing but the sensations of that night. She obsessively reaches to her neck to the spot where his fangs pierced the delicate skin. It seems as though she will always feel the pain of his fangs in her neck, for it did hurt dreadfully, and at the time she almost screamed. She can remember everything about that moment, from the awkward angle he held her neck at to the way her breathing hitched at the moment when he sunk his fangs deep into her neck, that small thing the only sign of her distress.

Her hands constantly twist in her lap, one hand grabbing the other so tightly it is almost as though the bones will snap as she tries, unconsciously, to replicate the way he held both of her hands, oh, so horribly tightly as he pressed her mouth to his chest. Often she bites the inside of her mouth until the blood flows into her mouth, exactly the way his did, and she wants to gag but instead her body swallows it eagerly.

She is constantly replicating what he did to her that night in those small ways, those little things, hardly noticeable, though Jonathan does notice.

They also think that she doesn't notice her body physically changing, she can tell. But how could she not notice it? She is mad painfully, constantly aware of it with every instant. The thought of eating makes her nauseous, and every time she eats she finds herself vomiting it all back up, though she must hide this fact from Jonathan, as it would worry him terribly.

She is scared to be around Jonathan as well, because there are moments when she can feel her teeth sharp in her mouth and she finds herself running her tongue over them as she imagines sinking them into his skin as she holds his body close to hers, eagerly swallowing his life, his vitality, even though there is so little of that now in poor Jonathan with his white hair and the wrinkles on his brow.

But she hides it all well, spending the evenings sewing even though she has never liked doing so, her head lowered to hide the burn mark on her forehead, that sign of shame. She keeps her hands busy with the stitching and mending so that they won't twist compulsively in her lap until they are red, just as they were after that night.

Jonathan notices it all. But of course he does; he cares about her and knows how she turns away from him at night when he puts his arms around her to comfort her from the nightmares he is wise enough to know she experiences. If she were a bit wiser she would tell him about how she feels, for he too has felt a vampire's fangs in his neck. He too knows the seductive power of that Count that brings both hate and love and lust.

She forgets how afraid he was when they saw the Count a few months ago, as she has had nightmares of doing.

But for her she doesn't know if they even are nightmares. She knows that at least once he has come to her room since then, taunting her and running his hands twice over her body as she shivered under his cold touch. She knows that he came that time to glorify in his victory, for victory it surely is, and the disturbingly deep connection that she felt with him then only verified that. After mocking her he bit her, and she said nothing, just as she had the other four nights.

That instance was so like her nightmares that she never knew if it really happened. She takes this as another sign that she's going mad.

Every day she wonders if she won't be there in the morning. She almost wishes that it would be over, because she hates being trapped between the two states, she hates that most of all. She dreads her impending slavery to him, but she also looks forward to it, for it is a liberation from the burning of the sun constantly when she wants to scream all day, from the necessity of at least making a pretense of eating, even when she knows that she cannot keep any of it down.

But she doesn't think about any of those things much, because the thought that preoccupies her is the constant thought that she repeats like a mantra in her mind. _I hate him._

It is the purpose behind all her actions, that hatred. She hates him even as (no indeed, _because of)_ the connection she feels to him, the pity, the near love. She grabs one hand with the other so tightly, and she thinks about the red of his eyes and the cold of his fingers and she imagines him dead.

If she wasn't working to destroy him, if she didn't have this purpose, she would have succumbed to despair. As it was, she trod the line of insanity, and she could often be heard muttering incoherant phrases. But at least she had the consolation of the image of his body dissolving into dust. None of her thoughts of him dead involved blood, however. That would just give her the feeling of not being able to breathe and the taste of iron in her mouth.

So she waits for his death, all the while thinking of how she belongs to him.


End file.
